In order to enable vehicle components in a motor vehicle, such as control units and sensors, to exchange communication data, a data bus or communication bus is needed. The architecture of such a communication bus defines a flow of said data, that is, it specifies in the first place which vehicle component is allowed to communicate directly or via a gateway with another vehicle component, if any. After determining the vehicle architecture in the course of a development process, the wiring of said vehicle will then be designed accordingly. This procedure does not allow for the flexible, fast development of additional functions before said vehicle enters the serial production stage. Moreover, due to differently equipped vehicle variants, there will be also complex wire harness variants for the respective wirings. In general, complex wire harness render a bus structure heavy and expensive.
From DE 10 2010 018 994 A1, a driver assistance system of a vehicle is known which includes sensors that store respective sensor data in a uniform format in a digital map of the surroundings, from which control units are able to read-out information. Here, all sensor data in said digital map of surroundings are pooled, independent from the specific control unit which will use said sensor data later. Therefore, a direct transmission of sensor data to individual control units is not necessary. A drawback of this solution is that it allows only the transmission of unified sensor data which are able to be rendered on a digital map of surroundings.
From DE 10 2014 100 628 A1, a bus system is known which provides time slots for the transmission of data between individual vehicle components. The time slots are of variable size, respectively, so that these time slots enable the transmission of data frames which have been adjusted based on the communication data to be transmitted. A drawback of said bus system is that each transmitted data frame needs to include a header which describes the structure of the subsequent time slots. This leads to undesirable overhead.
From DE 102 19 439 A1, a control system for a motor vehicle is known, wherein a gateway interconnects a plurality of module buses each of which bundles a subgroup or fraction of the control units of said motor vehicle. The gateway has a modular structure, so that in order to connect a module bus at a later stage, a respective card can be installed retroactively. A disadvantage of the provision of a gateway is that the whole data traffic which is to be exchanged between two module buses has to be routed via said gateway, which may therefore become heavily loaded.